Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblad, and you're listening to Bookworm.

Today, I'm honored to have as my guest, Angus Fletcher, a word about him.

He has written a book called A New Theory for American Poetry. It's published by

Harvard University Press. Its subtitle is Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination.

I became enthusiastic because there's nothing I love more than when someone takes on a new subject.

Angus Fletcher's books have been in Renaissance poetry.

I've read his book on Allegory and his book on Spencer.

There's a book of random essays.

But this is a book on American poetry,

and it really is finding a new point of origin that lets us hear the natural American voice

without beginning in Wordsworth and Shelley, but rather he's begun with what I used to call nature

poetry, but which he calls descriptive poetry, to tell us that as Americans, we like to enumerate.

And there was a poetry that was about going into a landscape without interpreting it.

But rather, recording one's crossing of it, one's intimacy with it,

in terms that are about the preciousness of the imminent and the little

and the anticipated revelation rather than the transcendental trumpets blaring. Now, did you start out,

was that your initiating idea to create for American poetry a new point of origin?

...